English literature: opening up the canon 9780801825910

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Preface (Leslie A. Fiedler, page vii)
Introduction (Houston A. Baker, Jr., page ix)
English and the Dynamics of South African Creative Writing (Dennis Brutus, page 1)
English in the Caribbean: Notes on Nation Language and Poetry (Edward Kamau Brathwaite, page 15)
Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective (Leslie Marmon Silko, page 54)
Literature as an Institution: The View from 1980 (Leslie A. Fiedler, page 73)
English as an Institution: The Role of Class (H. Bruce Franklin, page 92)
Stumbling on Melons: Sexual Dialectics and Discrimination in English Departments (Diana Hume George, page 107)
Fat-Cheeks Hefted a Snake: On the Origins and Institutionalization of Literature (George Stade, page 137)
The English Institute, 1979 (page 153)
The Program (page 155)
Sponsoring Institutions and Registrants, 1979 (page 157)

Citation preview

ENGLISH LITERATURE

Opening Up the Canon

Selected Papers from the English Institute New Series

1. Alvin B. Kernan, ed., Two Renaissance Mythmakers: Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson

2. Geoffrey H. Hartman, ed., Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text 3. Edward W. Said, ed., Literature and Society 4. Leslie A. Fiedler and Houston A. Baker, Jr., eds., English Literature: Opening Up the Canon

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English Literature OPENING UP THE CANON

4 Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1979 New Series, no. 4

Edited by Leslie A. Fiedler and Houston A. Baker, Jr.

THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS BALTIMORE AND LONDON

Copyright © 1981 by the English Institute All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland 21218 The Johns Hopkins Press Ltd., London Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data English Institute. English literature. (Selected papers from the English Institute ; 1979, new ser., no. 4) 1. English literature—20th century—History and criticism—Congresses. 2. English language in foreign countries—Congresses. 3. Literature and society Congresses. I. Fiedler, Leslie A. II. Baker, Houston A. III. Title. IV. Series: English Institute. Selected papers from the English Institute ; new ser., no. 4

PR9080.E53 1981 820.9 80-8863 ISBN 0-8018-2591-1

Contents

Leslie A. Fiedler vil

Preface

Introduction

Houston A. Baker, Jr. 1X

English and the Dynamics of South African

Dennis Brutus 1

Creative Writing

English in the Caribbean: Notes on Nation Language and Poetry

Edward Kamau Brathwaite 15

Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian

Leslie Marmon Silko 54

Perspective

Leslie A. Fiedler 73

Literature as an Institution: The View from 1980

H. Bruce Franklin 92

English as an Institution: The Role of Class

Stumbling on Melons: Sexual Dialectics and Discrimination in English Departments

Diana Hume George 107

Fat-Cheeks Hefted a Snake: On the Origins and Institutionalization of Literature

George Stade 137 v

vt Contents

The English Institute, 1979 153

The Program 155

Sponsoring Institutions and Registrants, 1979 157

aut i! Pee

Preface

(e The present collection of essays represents an attempt to escape from the parochialism that ordinarily limits discussions at meetings of the English Institute. It represents, in fact, two attempts, separately conceived and planned, which somehow worked together, turning out to have, if not a common goal, at least a shared discontent with the present situation. The authors of the pieces in this collection under the heading of “English as a World Language for Literature’? sometimes found themselves in disagreement with those included under the heading ‘“‘The Institution of Literature.” Yet, in retrospect, it seems as if they shared a common cause. Not only do the pieces in both categories deal with subjects not ordinarily treated at sessions of the English Institute—being

more political, more polemical, more passionate—but their mode of presentation is different as well. Many of them, that is to say, are informal, colloquial, confessional, while others are anecdotal or allegorical—one of them, shamelessly, a short story. It is doubtless misleading, moreover, to speak of them as essays; some at least. were designed to be heard rather than read, and consequently what appears on the printed page misrepresents their original impact and intent. We considered for a while, in fact, releasing this volume along with a tape of the proceedings, but technical difficulties deterred us. At some points in the pages that follow, therefore, readers will have to imagine the music of the discourse, quite as if they held in their hands a libretto or a score.

Lacking, too, is the controversy that surrounded many of these addresses: the protests, demurrers, and often hostile questions from the floor. But this, too, should be easily imagined by readers who, doubtless, will have objections of their own to the style or content of one essay or another. vil

Vill Preface The contributions to this volume, individually or collectively,

raise critical questions about the study of literature in the uni-

versity, limited as it is by unconscious assumptions of the teachers, rooted in race, class, and gender. Merely to recognize the problem is to begin solving it. LESLIE A. FIEDLER

ae Introduction ENGLISH AS A WORLD LANGUAGE FOR LITERATURE A SESSION FOR THE 1979 ENGLISH INSTITUTE

(& There are a number of issues that might be considered in this session of the English Institute. If one begins with the notion that literature is a representation of experience, one must ask how it is possible to represent in the English language experiences that occur, so to speak, in other languages. Philosophers of language assert that we do not think a thought and then transform the thought into language. Instead our thoughts are inseparable from the languages that give them form. How, then, does Tewa or Yoruba or Sotho thought achieve literary form in English? How, given the inseparability of thought and language, and the diversity of the world’s language communities, should one approach the notion that English has global status as a literary language? What presuppositions are embodied in this view, and what are the implications? __ Obviously, the conception of English as a ‘‘world language”’

is rooted in Western economic history. World trade, investment capitalism, and a market economy were predicated on fundamental revisions of feudal definitions of Homo laborans (man as laborer). The channel of communication for world trade was likely to be the language containing the most fitting statement of these revised definitions. Portuguese, Dutch, German, French, and English have all served as channels during

the past three and a half centuries. The global ascendency of English as a trade language, as a system giving semantic force to technological views of man and nature, has conditioned the study and evaluation of the English language. English, that is ix

x Introduction to say, seems a fitting language in which to think about modern man.

It was this proposition, or one very similar to it, that led Richard Wright to say in Black Boy that his attainment of ‘‘Prospero’s” language separated him forever from the peasant

world of his father. Looking at the gnarled hands and the primitive agricultural tools of his aged parent, Wright reflects that he himself has been lifted in the arms of Western experi-

ence (i.e., English as a language for modern literature and thought) and carried to exalted heights. A subtle resonance is created in the autobiography between this passage at the end of the first chapter and the concluding incident of chapter two, in which a black man points to the heavens and says to the protagonist: ‘Boy, remember this. You’re seeing man fly.” The point here, of course, is that Wright seems to feel that thinking about contemporary man and culture is inseparably linked to thinking in the “standard literary English’’ of industrial societies. One studies the language and grants a positive evaluation to it because to do so is to encounter a range of experience that is otherwise inaccessible.

This, I think, is also what some neocolonial scholars, writers, and economic advisers are suggesting when they say that they

cannot express their “most complex and striking notions’ in any language other than English. (A Yale University professor from a formerly colonized portion of the world once expressed this point of view to me with all the furious energy of a convert _ to a new faith. My response at the time, some three years ago,

must have left him feeling that I was being stubborn, coy, or obtuse. I suggested that the Creole of his native island might be quite suitable for ‘advanced thought.’’) To adopt an explanation grounded in economics alone, however, is to drastically reduce the scope of an inquiry into English

as a world language for literature. Judged exclusively on the basis of its force in the economic arena, English clearly has (for the moment) a hands-down advantage. If one introduces the

Introduction x1 conceptualization of man as Homo ludens (man at play), however, what happens to the indisputable economic authority of English? If one extends the range of the modern experience to include modes of behavior that are not traditionally defined as essential to processes of economic production and distribution, does English then drop in the scale of value? In the factory hospital episode of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the protagonist’s discovery of his basic humanity seems to occur in an

environment where spoken language fails to operate in the accustomed way. He falls into a reverie of the agrarian South in

which the prominent images are of black convicts fleeing the enforced labor of the chain gang, of a black trumpeter playing a sacred song called “The Heavenly City,” and of his elderly srandmother reciting to him a folk rhyme whose cosmology begins with God in heaven engaged in a ludic act of creation. His return from this reverie is marked by silence; he cannot hear the words that the representatives of industrial society seem

to be directing toward him. Their lips move in soundless pantomime. The protagonist is baffled by the inability of those who wish to be his captors to communicate with him. “But we are all human,” he thinks to himself. What this thought and, indeed, the episode as a whole seem to imply is: ‘““Yes, we are all human, but their language, since it is centered on Homo laborans, too severely discounts realms of experience that are fundamental to the notion of a human being.” Call it the ludic dimension, the marginal zone, or the liminal region, the protagonist seems to suggest, but give due recognition to Homo ludens in any contemporary definition of the term “chuman.”’

I do not want to insist here that these two neatly selfcontained conceptualizations of human beings—economic man defined by the English language, and man at play, defined by a kind of wordless dreaminess—confront each other across a great divide. Instead, my concern is to place in proper perspective the economic ascendancy of English and the historical correlation between this ascendancy and processes of modern thought.

x11 Introduction In a sense, I want to go back to those pre-English-speaking moments in the life of world societies and to trace the complex interactions in thought and action between the worlds of the Tewa, the Yoruba, and the Sotho, up to the point where, say, a Yoruba speaker makes the decision that English is indeed a world language for literature and begins to use English for his own acts of creative, linguistic expression designed for a reading public. I suspect that by the time the Yoruba writer makes such a decision, his knowledge of English includes the rules and relationships, signs and codes, that make the language suitable for his expressive designs. The world of Homo ludens, crafted in a non-English-speaking society, has come into the purview of

English as a result of acculturative interaction between the Yoruba writer and the English-language trader. Notions of Homo laborans that modify forever the trader’s ethnocentric ideas of economic production and distribution have also come into the purview of English. Writing of the Bandung Conference, which took place in Indonesia in 1956, and which gave birth to the concept of a “Third World,” Richard Wright asserts in The Color Curtain that one result of the conference, and indeed a necessary correlative of the rise of a Third World that employed English as a lingua franca, was the introduction of a new “moral dimension” into the English language. I believe that what Wright intended by his statement was that acculturation is a two-way process. Those whose labor and resources are exploited, whose land is annexed and possessed, whose language and culture are derogated by the colonizer are, nevertheless, vibrant human beings who have a profound effect on those who come in the name of civilization. Not only do the colonized or the enslaved populations preserve vital elements of their indigenous cultural styles during the ordeal of their servitude, but they also modify the basic cultural grammar of the colonizer. Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz discovers the truth of this assertion at the cost of his life. To simply say that English rules the economic heartland and

Introduction X11 thus controls the literary world is to foreclose far-ranging inquiry. The fact that a Sotho writer claims that he has chosen English because it guarantees a wide audience and ensures access to the literary reproduction systems of a world market may be less important as a literary consideration than what the writer has actually made of the English language as a literary agency. One might want to ask, for example, what summits of experience inaccessible to occupants of the heartland have been incorporated into the world of English literature? What literary strategies have been employed by the Sotho writer to preserve and communicate culturally-specific meanings? What codes of analysis and evaluation must be articulated in order to render accurate explanations for a Sotho or a Tewa or a Yoruba literary work written in English? I am quite ready to assert that English as a world language for

literature achieves this status through the actions of the world at large, and not through the actions of, as it were, The English. I am further prepared to suggest that those who are within the traditional, economically-sanctioned territories of English literary expression are often incapable of comprehending what men and women in the world-at-large have made of English. The realms of experience represented in the language today, and the literary-critical and theoretical strategies that must be employed in order to grasp them, are subjects that seem to be almost exclusive possessions of a Third World. The Third World is, of course, a region comparable to Blake’s realm of the fourfold vision, that is, a difficult region to negotiate if the mind and the mind’s eye are not fully open. HOUSTON A. BAKER, JR.

EY,

Dennis Brutus

English and the Dynamics of South African Creative Writing a My discussion of the predicament of the creative writer in South Africa is essentially an examination of the context in which that writer operates and the factors at work on him or her—particularly those that inhibit creative work.

“The influences that operate on the creative writer”’ would more exactly describe what I am trying to do. Because South Africa is a strange society—in the sense of peculiar—it is helpful

to look at the forces in the society that function either to promote or to inhibit creative writing. To do this, however, is to look also at the society and indeed briefly to sketch the development of writing in English in South Africa.

South Africa is currently independent, and began its existence, in European history, anyway, first as a Dutch, and then as a British colony. Writing in English in South Africa began in 1854 with Thomas Pringle, who was one of the settlers brought to South Africa in a large contingent at the end of the Napoleonic War. Pringle brought with him something of the English liberal tradition to the extent that within four years he was being forced out, forced back to Britain because of his criticism of the colonial administration. That exercise of power by an autocratic governor is, perhaps, as good a note as any on which to begin the history of English literature in South Africa. Since then, a few figures have won some international recognition. They include Alan Paton; Nadine Gordimer, probably South Africa’s most distinguished novelist; and Athol Fugard, who has achieved an international reputation as a playwright. Before that we had a few rather less well-known names on the international scene: Olive Schreiner, with her novel The Story of an African Farm, and William Plomer, whose precocious novel Turbott Wolfe was written when he was only nineteen. For those of us who follow black writing in Africa, there are also 1

2 Dennis Brutus those names that are known all over the world in terms of black literature, such as Alex LaGuma; Mazisi Kunene, who writes in Zulu; Peter Abrahams, long exiled from South Africa; and Ezekiel Mphahlele.

The white South African writers, who enjoy advantages in publication and facilities and contacts not known to blacks, tend to be better known. South African society consists of two principal colonial streams: the English settlers and the Dutch settlers. The latter developed their own form of Dutch, called Afrikaans, a kind of patois that derived from it and is less well known. The Afrikaners have a much narrower audience. One of them, the poet, Breyten Breytenbach, has achieved some degree of international recognition. This recognition may, however, be the consequence of his antigovernment activities. He is currently serving a nine-year prison sentence in South Africa, and this, rather than his distinction in poetry, may be the basis of his reputation. It is useful to look at some of the salient features of the South African context of society as they affect the writer. Following is some fairly crude information: roughly 25,000 books have been banned in South Africa and declared illegal. Possession of these books, reading them, and quoting from them are all criminal acts. Some fairly obvious books, such as obscene publications, are banned on the grounds of pornography. But many of the banned books would be considered harmless, if perhaps radical, elsewhere in the world. As of now 750 persons in South Africa are banned from publishing in South Africa or from having their work read or quoted in South Africa. They are also forbidden to attend any gathering where more than two people are present. (I myself fell into all of these categories when I was living in South Africa, and my work continues to be banned.) Most of the major writers, both white and black, are in exile at the present time. And perhaps a more dismaying statistic is that at least three major Afrikaner poets,

English and South African Writing 3 and twice as many black writers according to some reports, committed suicide in South Africa in recent years.

Toby Moyana, in a lengthy essay titled “Problems of the Creative Writer in South Africa,’’ contended that the government was literally legislating literature out of existence, that it was becoming impossible for people to write. It might be worthwhile to mention some of the legislation. One of the blanket laws that permits much of control legislation dates back to 1927; it is called the Bantu Administration Act. Since then the South African government has passed the Entertainment Censorship Act of 1931, the Unlawful Organization Act (1960), and the Publications and Entertainment Act (1956). In 1969 a great kind of umbrella law that makes virtually every-

thing illegal if the state deems it to be illegal, called the General Laws Amendment Act, was passed.

The mechanism by which these laws operate is instructive. Since about 1963 South Africa has had a Publications Control

Board; this board determines what is fit for publication. It creates a real problem for publishers because the banning decisions often take place only after publication—after the publishers have already committed themselves to production. When the book is about to go on sale, the government issues a ruling that the publication is illegal, and this can cause great financial hardship.

It is sometimes said that repression may stimulate activity and that therefore there is a kind of paradoxical merit in being put under the pressures that are placed on South African writers. Oddly enough, there may be some evidence that confirms this theory in the society. It is true, for instance, that in 1976 when there was a massive uprising in the ghettos, especially those in the South West Townships that are lumped together under the word ‘‘Soweto,” there was an incredible efflorescence of writing in the ghetto—particularly of poetry. Even more exciting has been the appearance of a kind of improvised

4 Dennis Brutus theatre, an open air or guerrilla theatre with improvised poetry,

much of which is not committed to paper. The poets seem especially to be responsive to the new tensions, the new pressures that are developing in the society. It should be said the blacks in the ghettos see the affluence and the wealth of the apartheid society as being directly depen-

dent on the sustenance it receives from outside countries, particularly Western countries. The massive injections of capital,

and the transfer of technology to the apartheid society, are seen very clearly in the ghettos as factors that enable a minority

regime to remain in power. Perhaps the greatest support that the West has given to South Africa (there is little more that they can give in addition to this) has been to provide South Africa with the capability of manufacturing nuclear weapons. This has been achieved through the assistance of the United States, France, and West Germany. It seems there is not much more that can be done except to continue as before. Many blacks feel that the West has made its ultimate commitment to the white society, and this commitment extends even into the realm of the arts. In literature, in the theatre, in ballet, and in music, the racist and repressive South African society continues to draw sustenance from the West. The blacks see this as simply one more dimension of Western support for a racist minority.

I should add at this point that very soon the United Nations will be launching new initiatives aimed at an embargo of South Africa; this will include a cultural embargo. There are people in the United States who could, I believe, make a significant contribution by supporting a cultural embargo. How have the blacks responded in South Africa? How has creativity been expressed in this repressive society? And how would one answer the question raised by Houston Baker about the new insights that are brought into the English language by writers whose first language is not English? We may have a different world view and a different cosmology. I spent some time pondering this and came up with what may be a disap-

English and South African Writing 5 pointing reply: I cannot see a great deal that is significantly new or inventive. If there were time, I could catalogue some of

the minor variations, particularly in African perception of a creator, a universal force that tends generally to be female. | could tell you that the African sense of time is circular, and that the living and the dead cocxist in the same kind of human fabric. I think these are incipient rather than developed features. They are implicit in some of the writings and, given an opportunity, may become more evident. There may, in fact, be an explanation for the failure to come up with new perceptions through communication in English. We are dealing with a society where communication between people is illegal, a society

that creates a battery of laws that makes communication between people from different cultures or from different groups a criminal act. It can be a crime in South Africa for two people of different races to drink tea together, or to be in the same restaurant together. One example, my favorite, is drawn from the area in which I

was most deeply involved in South Africa—that of sport. A black athlete running on the same track with a white athlete could be arrested, or a black tennis player on the same tennis court with a white tennis player could go to prison. There are very blatant forms of discrimination imposed by the legal system, for which there are sanctions. Those who attempt to communicate are punished. It may be that in such a society one can neither come up with insights and perceptions into another culture nor with new ways of expressing what already exists in that culture. The substance of the writing, particularly the new poetry, is first of all an attempt to articulate a community experience, to convey what is in the society rather than in the individual. Of course, in the African artistic and literary traditions, especially in the oral tradition, there is so much that antecedes the expression of ideas and the feelings of the community as opposed to the feelings of the individual. We have currently a completely

6 Dennis Brutus new batch of young poets coming out of the ghettos, and their themes are pretty much the same: anger at the cruelty and the injustice of the system, and an attempt to articulate that anger,

to go beyond it, and to function as rallying points, as interpreters of the feeling of the society. The titles of the works are revealing. One of the most important, banned almost immediately after publication, is called Cry Rage; it was a joint venture by James Matthews and Gladys Thomas. Another, published shortly thereafter with the work of nine poets in it, was banned immediately—that was called Black Voices Shout. In addition to books, magazines, many of them ephemeral, are also banned; some of them are banned by issue rather than by a blanket ban. A magazine like Staffrider, which is a vehicle for black writers, had its first issue banned, but the second, third, and fourth issues are still available. Perhaps it, too, will cease publication, as many of the others have. The writing is now published mainly in magazines and periodicals; these are often joint ventures by whites and blacks who are opponents of the system. Books of this kind have become rare.

It is important to remember, I think, that because of the colonial history of South Africa, every educated black is exposed to the mainstream of the English literary tradition. Blacks begin learning Shakespeare and Wordsworth in junior school (‘‘Daffodils” is learned in almost every school). In high school blacks begin to read what might be called classics: Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities and Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans are included in high school reading. They might even read an early Shakespeare comedy. By the time one goes to — university, one is exposed to three years of English. If you are going to major in it, you go through the traditional kind of syllabus, beginning with Chaucer, through the Elizabethans (and perhaps the Metaphysicals), on to the Romantics and the Victorians, and perhaps reading a few of the modern poets as well. This pretty much is the range of exposure for an African being educated under a system inherited from the British uni-

English and South African Writing 7 versity system. The example of the commitment by English writers, and the criticisms of society by such writers as Milton, Wordsworth, Blake, and Shelley, strike responsive chords in the African writer. Indeed, some African writers have been criticized for a too-slavish imitation of their English models. The break, it is evident, comes in the very recent past; it 1s

a move away from traditional form toward a very conscious attempt at immediacy, at direct and unadorned communication. This, I fear, would suffer if it were judged by any academic canon, for it hardly conforms to accepted notions about the craft

of poetry. They would reply, quite frankly, that they are not interested in creating works that will endure, that they are not interested in creating works that will pass muster in the university; they would say instead that their preoccupation is with immediate and effective communication with the people around them. That may be not an unworthy goal. The writer suffers, however, not only from the restraints and limitations imposed on him by the legal system, but by a whole

new set of pressures that flow from convention and prejudice rather than from the law. These restraints, these pressures on black writers and writing are due to the arrogance of the literary critics and the contemptuous handling of black writers by established literary persons. It seems to me to be so pervasive that I am beginning to wonder whether arrogance is not an occupational hazard for all critics. Of course, I ought to give some examples of this, and I offer something that is of fairly recent vintage and this is typical. The South African critic A. G. Wyett, who has taught English literature in Kenya, Rhodesia, and Swaziland before coming to South Africa (those were his credentials), discusses the dilemma of black South African poetry in an essay. He says the black poet has to determine how he is going to make meaningful use of a centuries-old, culturallyenriched language in the relatively undeveloped cultural environment in which he finds himself. He finds that the black poet often falls into the trap of pretentiousness, writing flat and

8 Dennis Brutus clichéd lines, while believing that his lines are really successful poetic creations. Wyett does, however, balance this comment

with something else, which may be a redeeming comment (I don’t know, because what he concedes is the following): ‘“‘The

poet may create some remote possible line, but this achievement may be attained more by chance, by fortuitous ignorance of style, idiom, imitation and so on, rather than by deliberate artistic intention. For one thing, the black writer has to remember that the part chance plays in the creation of poetry in a language belonging to a foreign culture has yet to be explored.

Perhaps we ought to hold off until exploration is complete.” Perhaps Wyett himself would undertake to be a trailblazer. Wyett goes on to say that the evidence may yet be found to support his belief that good lines written by the black poet in a language not his own are the product of accident, rather than choice.

Wyett goes on to criticize African poetry for another weakness: the poet has become too committed, too much of an en-

gaged poet. Here Wyett can cite W. H. Auden’s authority; Auden said (and I think that this has become, unfortunately, almost an article of faith), ‘““Let a poet if he wants to, write engaged poems. But let him remember this: the only person who will benefit from it is himself. The evil or injustice will remain exactly as it would have been if he had kept his mouth shut.”

I think Auden underestimates his impact on his own, and on future, generations. I believe he has moved others through his sense of concern for humanity. So, he may have judged his own work too meanly. We return to our critic Wyett, who says: “If poets recognize

the enormously healthy potential open to them in a poetic rebellion, they will eventually create notorious poems. At present the prevalent critical emphasis on the sterile and toxic impotence of resentment is engendering a poetry characterized by immaturity.”’ Now you can see paternalism beginning to show its ugly head. For he goes on: “Yet we must not be too severe in

English and South African Writing 9 our condemnation of it, just as we should not always be severe on the young. And there by the same token, we must not be unduly indulgent, otherwise the healthy young tradition may well grow warped or stunted.”’

There is a great deal more of that kind of reasoning, but I am inclined to pass over it. I wish, however (to balance that), to quote a correspondent who wrote to the journal Contrast pro-

testing the condescending and arrogant attitudes of critics. H. Davis says that the insensitivity and incompetence of Wyett is underlined by his admitted failure to grasp the meaning of a

poem that he quotes. Perhaps Davis might have been left in possession of the field, but the editor of the journal (and Contrast is a fairly authoritative journal by South African literary standards) comes to the defense of the journal: “I think it is correct to say that no member of this magazine’s editorial board has ever looked back or judged for acceptance a manuscript of a poem or any other work in the light of the race or skin color of the contributor. It therefore comes as news to me that ten or

a dozen or whatever number of black poems have been published in our pages. Good for the poets. If these poets are black Africans writing in English, which is not their mother tongue, then their achievement is all the more impressive.” Davis goes on to say, “Since this periodical first appeared in December 1960, and they have had ten or twelve blacks since 1960, it has stuck to the original concept of the founding group that its policy is to have no policy.” “Of course, it can be asserted that no politics is also politics, and that in the South African context, it is well nigh impossible

to open one’s mouth or to take up a pen without being committed to a political act.” Having made that statement, the editor makes no effort to rebut it, a situation that I found curious, to say the least.

In order to take the issue just a little further afield—or perhaps to bring it a little nearer home—I am going to refer to another critical aberration, but not one that is limited to South

10 Dennis Brutus Africa. Chinua Achebe, the distinguished African novelist, gave

an address at a welcome reception, which was given for us by the mayor of Berlin, at a festival intended to open dialogue between Africa and West Germany, or indeed, between Africa and the West. In the course of responding to the welcome, Achebe made the remark that Africans are interested in dialogue on the

basis of equality, that they are not interested in the kind of partnership that is that of a rider and a horse. Achebe talked about Joseph Conrad and expressed alarm at the determination of the West to have Africa explained to it by Western experts, and at the way the West very deliberately excludes Africans, who themselves are attempting to interpret their culture and their country. He says that Europe’s (and America’s) reliance

on its own experts in reporting on the true nature of Africa would not worry anybody if it did not, at the same time, attempt to exclude the testimony of Africans. But it often does. He quotes an expert who says that ‘“‘the real African” lives in the bush, goes around naked, and tells fairy stories about the crocodile and the elephant; and he adds wryly, “As the pace of

change quickens, there won’t be many authentic Africans left around. Certainly not any with the wholesome and unques-

tioning admiration of white people, which was the chief attraction of the bush African. In any case, the businessman who is in Africa for profit today isn’t going to consult a witch doctor for his opinion on an investment first.”’ He then brings it even nearer home. He discusses a recent article in the New York Times Book Review. Elizabeth Hardwick interviewed V. S. Naipaul on the publication of his new book, A Bend in the River. Hardwick commented: ‘‘Naipual’s work is a creative reflection upon a devastating lack of historical preparation, upon the anguish of whole countries when peoples are able to quote.” She quotes, according to Achebe, with apparent glee and approval from the growing corpus of scornful work which Naipaul has written on Africa, India, and South America and from his report on his Congo travels, where he sees ‘‘. . . native

English and South African Writing 11 people camping on the ruins of civilization’? and “the bush creeming back as you stood there.” This is Achebe’s comment: “Reading Elizabeth Hardwick’s interview, an absurd or rather pathetic picture rises from the printed page. An old American lady lapping up like a wide-eyed little girl every drop of pretentious drivel that falls from the lips of a literary guru who is smart enough to fill his devotee with comforting myths.” Her last question, predictably, was “What is the future of Africa?” His part and equally predictable reply was: “Africa has no future.” This new Conrad figure, says Achebe, neither European nor African, will have his day and pass on, leaving the problem of dialogue, which has plagued Afro-American European relations for centuries, unsolved until Europe is ready to concede total African humanity. Again, let me redress the balance just for a moment by point-

ing to some very distinguished American critics who have written with perception and sympathy on African literature. Perhaps it is invidious to single out particular pieces that | found especially valuable, but I do wish to mention Wilfred Cartey’s book, Whispers From a Continent, and Paul Theroux’s

excellent early essay, ‘‘Voices from the Skull,” on poetry in Africa.

As we leave the seventies and enter the eighties, I think it might be helpful to attempt a prediction about the literature being produced by English-speaking white South Africans and the English-speaking black South Africans. We might also look

at those who are writing in Afrikaans, the other official language. There is, of course, an enormous body of material being turned out in the African languages themselves: Zulu, Xosa, Sotho, and others. Some of it is oral, some of it is improvised and passed on. Some of it is committed to paper. There is a very special bind here, though, that I ought to explain. Because the

apartheid government—the minority white government—has tried to revive the old tribal structures and to force the Africans back into those structures in order to prevent them from

12 Dennis Brutus participating in the present political processes, the Africans tend to be suspicious even of their own languages and literary vehicles. They are fearful that these might be turned against them and used as one further pretext to force them back into a tribal mode within a broad policy of what are known as the Bantustans—a strategy that is aimed at forcing black Africans back into tribal structures. But nevertheless there is a great deal of literature being created. The English writers, I fear, will probably go on like Wyett and the editor of Contrast: not only arrogant but blind—or blinkered to their own arrogance. It may well be said that South Africa is not the only part of the world where a certain arrogance is exhibited toward minority writers. The Afrikaners have an interesting opportunity, because as of

now, political power is vested in the hands of the Afrikaansspeaking minority (although they hold their power with the collaboration of the English-speaking group). It may be that if the Afrikaners can reach their own people and persuade them that the issue is not survival, as they contend, but rather the question of the surrender of privilege, they can perform an extremely useful function in the society and actually help to change the direction of its history, which seems now headed for inevitable disaster.

It seems to me that the black African writers can only become more defiant and intransigent; that they will continue to be, as they have been in the past, rallying centers around which

groups form in opposition in their resistance to the system. Nadine Gordimer, in an extremely penetrating essay on the myths in the literature of South Africa, has pointed to two myths that seem to help in understanding the white literature. She finds, particularly among the Afrikaans writers, a tendency to blame the British imperial power which crushed them at the beginning of the century, to blame that power for the ills of the present, and to say, “We ourselves were rolled over by the British imperial Juggernaut. We cannot take responsibility for what is wrong in society as of now.”

English and South African Writing 13 The other myth, which is fairly closely related to it, is that more and more (and a specific example is a quite brilliant work called Dustlands in English), by an examination of the behavior of other societies, particularly the killings in Vietnam, or genocidal activities in New Zealand, Tasmania, or Australia, or among the American Indians in this country, parallels can be found for the behavior of the South African regime,

which enables them to say, ‘“We’re as bad as everybody else, but no worse.” Therefore they can continue doing what they are doing now.

Gordimer suggests that these are two of the most important myths that enable white South Africans to live comfortably with themselves. I suggest that the one that will emerge more strongly is the argument that white South Africans can deny black South Africans political rights, and indeed even South African nationality, by offering them instead some kind of dummy citizenship in a little client or satellite state, carved off from South Africa as the country is dismembered by the process called the Bantustan Policy. They will then be able to argue, “‘We have not really denied them rights; we have simply substituted other rights for those we have deprived them of.” In this context, the process of creative writing for both white South Africa and black South Africa becomes much more difficult. You have the battery of laws to contend with; you have the prejudices in the society; you have the myths that justify continued oppression in the society. You have, unfortunately, the money still being pipelined into South Africa from outside to keep the regime solvent and, indeed, prosperous. And so we roll on to an agonizing and inevitable destructiveness.

I would like to close by harking back to a point I made earlier: it may be that those of us who have a concern about creative writing, about creativity, and beyond that, about the simple business of being human—that all of us can be involved in the process that reduces the aid currently being given to the South African regime. By doing what we already do a great

14 Dennis Brutus | deal more, we can actually minimize the area, the extent, the duration, and the scale of the conflict that must come to South Africa, and in that way we can make our own humane contribution.

7} e

“ Edward Kamau Brathwaite

English in the Caribbean NOTES ON NATION LANGUAGE AND POETRY AN ELECTRONIC LECTURE* You may excel in knowledge of their tongue and universal ties may bind you close to them; but what they say, and how they feel— the subtler details of their meaning, thinking, feeling, reaching—

these are closed to you and me... as are, indeed, the interleaves of speech —our speech—which fall to them...

dead leaves... —G. Adali-Morty, ‘“‘Belonging” from Messages

The Negro in the West Indies becomes proportionately whiter—that is, he becomes closer to being a real human being—in direct ratio to his mastery of the language. —Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masque blancs

Yurokon held the twine in his hands as if with a snap, a single fierce pull, he would break it now at last. Break the land. Break the sea. Break

| the savannah. Break the forest. Break the twig. Break the bough. —Wilson Harris, Sleepers of Roraima

(oy What I am going to talk about this morning is language from the Caribbean, the process of using English in a different

way from the “norm.” English in a sense as I prefer to call *Professor Brathwaite says of nation language that, ‘When it is written, you lose

the sound or the noise, and therefore you lose part of the meaning,” Surely this written representation of Professor Brathwaite’s unscripted remarks, which I have edited, loses some of the magnificent force and meaning that his live performance conveyed in Cambridge. The reader, for example, will not only miss the sound of Professor Brathwaite’s voice but also the sound of the taped recordings and accompanying music that added much to his presentation. Nonetheless, the following remarks are in themselves quite remarkable in what they convey of a new sensc of sound, and noise, emerging from the present-day Caribbean.—H.A.B.t tProfessor Baker’s sensitive version has been further revised by the speaker, who has added footnotes and some texts.

15

16 Edward Kamau Brathwaite it. English in an ancient sense. English in a very traditional sense. And sometimes not English at all, but language. I start my thoughts, taking up from the discussion developed

after Dennis Brutus’s excellent presentation. Without logic, and through instinct, the people who spoke with Dennis from the floor yesterday brought up the question of language. Actually, Dennis’s presentation had nothing to do with language. He was speaking about the structural condition of South Africa. But instinctively people recognized that the structural condition described by Dennis had very much to do with language. He didn’t concentrate on the language aspect of it because there wasn’t enough time and because it was not his main

concern. But it was interesting that your instincts, not your logic, moved you toward the question of the relationship between language and culture, language and structure. In his case, it was English, and English as spoken by Africans, and the native languages as spoken by Africans. We in the Caribbean have a similar kind of plurality. We have

English, which is the imposed language on much of the archipelago; it is an imperial language, as are French, Dutch, and Spanish. We also have what we call Creole English, which is a mixture of English and an adaptation that English took in the new environment of the Caribbean when it became mixed with the other imported languages. We have also what is called nation language, which is the kind of English spoken by the people who were brought to the Caribbean, not the official English now, but the language of slaves and laborers—the servants who | were brought in by the conquistadors. Finally, we have the remnants of ancestral languages still persisting in the Caribbean. There is Amerindian, which is active in certain parts of Central America but not in the Caribbean because the Amerindians are a destroyed people, and their languages were practically destroyed. We have Hindi, spoken by some of the more traditional East Indians who live in the Caribbean, and there are also varieties of Chinese.’ And, miraculously, there are survivals of Afri-

English in the Caribbean 17 can languages still persisting in the Caribbean. So we have that spectrum—that prism—of languages similar to the kind of structure that Dennis described for South Africa. Now, I have to give

you some kind of background to the development of these languages, the historical development of this plurality, because I can’t take it for granted that you know and understand the history of the Caribbean. The Caribbean is a set of islands stretching out from Florida in a mighty curve. You must know of the Caribbean at least from television, at least now with hurricane David* coming right into it. The islands stretch out in an arc of some two thou-

sand miles from Florida through the Atlantic to the South American coast, and they were originally inhabited by Amerindian people, Taino, Siboney, Carib, Arawak. In 1492, Columbus “discovered” (as it is said) the Caribbean, and with that discovery came the intrusion of European culture and peoples and a fragmentation of the original Amerindian culture. We had Europe “nationalizing” itself, and there were Spanish, French, English, and Dutch conquerors so that people had to start speaking (and thinking in) four metropolitan languages rather than possibly a single native language. Then with the destruction of the Amerindians, which took place within thirty years of Columbus’s discovery (one million dead a year), it was necessary for the Europeans to import new labor bodies into the Caribbean. And the most convenient form of labor was the labor on the very edge of the trade winds—the labor on the edge of the slave trade winds, the labor on the edge of the hurricane, the labor on the edge of West Africa. And so the peoples of Ashanti, Congo, Nigeria, from all that mighty

coast of western Africa were imported into the Caribbean. And we had the arrival in that area of a new language structure. It consisted of many languages, but basically they hada common *This talk was presented at Harvard late in August 1979. Hurricanes ravish the Caribbean and the southern coasts of the United States in the summer of every year.

18 Edward Kamau Brathwaite semantic and stylistic form.? What these languages had to do, however, was to submerge themselves, because officially the conquering peoples—the Spaniards, the English, the French, and the Dutch—insisted that the language of public discourse and conversation, of obedience, command, and reception, should be English, French, Spanish, or Dutch. They did not wish to hear people speaking Ashanti or any of the Congolese languages. So there was a submergence of this imported language. Its status became one of inferiority. Similarly, its speakers were slaves. They were conceived of as inferiors—nonhuman, in fact. But this very submergence served an interesting intercultural purpose, because although people continued to speak English as it was spoken in Elizabethan times and on through the Romantic and Victorian ages, that English was, nonetheless, still being influenced by the underground language, the submerged language that the slaves had brought. And that underground language was itself constantly transforming itself into new forms. It was moving from a purely African form to a form that was African, but which was adapted to the new environment and adapted to the cultural imperative of the European languages. And it was influencing the way in which the French, Dutch, and Spanish spoke their own languages. So there was a very complex process taking place, which is now begining to surface in our literature. In the Caribbean, as in South Africa (and in any area of cultural imperialism for that matter), the educational system did not recognize the presence of these various languages. What our educational system did was to recognize and maintain the lan-

| - guage of the conquistador—the language of the planter, the language of the official, the language of the Anglican preacher. It insisted that not only would English be spoken in the Anglophone Caribbean, but that the educational system would carry

the contours of an English heritage. Hence, as Dennis said, Shakespeare, George Eliot, Jane Austen—British literature and

literary forms, the models that were intimate to Europe, that were intimate to Great Britain, that had very little to do, really,

English in the Caribbean 19 with the environment and the reality of the Caribbean—were dominant in the Caribbean educational system. It was a very surprising situation. People were forced to learn things that had no relevance to themselves. Paradoxically, in the Caribbean (as in many other “cultural disaster” areas), the people educated in this system came to know more, even today, about English kings and queens than they do about our own national heroes, our own slave rebels—the people who helped to build and to destroy our society. We are more excited by English literary models, by the concept of, say, Sherwood Forest and Robin Hood, than we are by Nanny of the Maroons, a name some of us didn’t even know until a few years ago.® And in terms of what we write, our perceptual models, we are more conscious (in terms of sensibility) of the falling of snow for instance—the models are all there for the falling of the snow—than of the force of the hurricanes that take place every year. In other words, we haven’t got the syllables, the syllabic intelligence, to describe the hurricane, which is our own experience;* whereas we can describe the imported alien experience of the snowfall. It is that kind of situation that we are in. Now the Creole adaptation to that is the little child who, instead of writing in an essay ‘““The snow was falling on the fields

of Shropshire” (which is what our children literally were writing until a few years ago, below drawings they made of white snow fields and the corn-haired people who inhabited such a landscape), wrote “The snow was falling on the cane fields.’’®

The child had not yet reached the obvious statement that it wasn’t snow at all, but rain that was probably falling on the cane fields. She was trying to have both cultures at the same time. But that is creolization. What is even more important, as we develop this business of

emergent language in the Caribbean, is the actual rhythm and the syllables, the very body work, in a way, of the language. What English has given us as a model for poetry, and to a lesser extent, prose (but poetry is the basic tool here), is the pentam-

20 Edward Kamau Brathwaite eter: “The curfew tdlls the knéll of parting day.” There have, of course, been attempts to break it. And there were other dominant forms like, for example, Beowulf (c. 750), The Seafarer, and what Langland (1322?-1400?) had produced: For trewthe telleth that love. is triacle of hevene; May no synne be on him sene. that useth that spise, And alle his werkes he wrougte. with love as him liste.

Or, from Piers the Plowman (which does not make it into Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, but which we all had to ‘‘do” at school) the haunting prologue: In a somer seson. whan soft was the sonne I shope me into shroudes. as J a shepe were

which has recently inspired our own Derek Walcott with his first major nation language effort: In idle August, while the sea soft, and leaves of brown islands stick to the rim of this Caribbean, I blow out the light by the dreamless face of Maria Concepcion to ship as a seaman on the schooner Flight.°®

But by the time we reach Chaucer (1345-1400), the pentameter prevails. Over in the New World, the Americans—Walt Whitman—

tried to bridge or to break the pentameter through a cosmic movement, a large movement of sound. Cummings tried to frag-

ment it. And Marianne Moore attacked it with syllabics. But basically the pentameter remained, and it carries with it a cer, tain kind of experience, which is not the experience of a hurricane. The hurricane does not roar in pentameter. And that’s the problem: how do you get a rhythm that approximates the natural experience, the environmental experience? We have been trying to break out of the entire pentametric model in the _ Caribbean and to move into a system that more closely and intimately approaches our own experience. So that is what we are talking about now.

English in the Caribbean Z1 It is nation language in the Caribbean that, in fact, largely ignores the pentameter. Nation language is the language that is influenced very strongly by the African model, the African aspect of our New World/Caribbean heritage. English it may be in terms of its lexicon, but it is not English in terms of its syntax. And English it certainly is not in terms of its rhythm and timbre, its own sound explosion. In its contours, it is not English, even though the words, as you hear them, would be English to a greater or lesser degree. And this brings us back to the question that some of you raised yesterday: can English be a revolutionary language? And the lovely answer that came back was: it is not English that is the agent. It is not language, but people, who make revolutions. { think, however, that language does really have a role to play here, certainly in the Caribbean. But it is an English that is not

the standard, imported, educated English, but that of the submerged, surrealist experience and sensibility, which has always been there and which is now increasingly coming to the surface and influencing the perception of contemporary Caribbean people. It is what I call, as I say, nation language. | use the term in contrast to dialect. The word dialect has been bandied about for a long time, and it carries very pejorative overtones. Dialect is thought of as bad English. Dialect is “inferior English.’ Dialect is the language when you want to make fun of someone. Caricature speaks in dialect. Dialect has a long history coming from the plantation where people’s dignity is distorted through

their language and the descriptions that the dialect gave to them. Nation language, on the other hand, is the submerged area of that dialect that is much more closely allied to the African aspect of experience in the Caribbean. It may be in English, but often it is in an English which is like a howl, or a shout, or a machine-gun, or the wind, or a wave. It is also like the blues. And sometimes it is English and African at the same time. I am going to give you some examples. But I should tell you that the reason I have to talk so much is that there has been very little

22 Edward Kamau Brathwaite written about our nation language. I bring you to the notion of nation language but I can refer you to very little literature, to very few resources. I cannot refer you to what you call an establishment. I cannot really refer you to authorities because there aren’t any.’ One of our urgent tasks now is to try to create our own authorities. But I will give you a few ideas of what people have tried to do. The forerunner of all this was, of course, Dante Alighieri who, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, argued, in De vulgari eloquentia (1304), for the recognition of the (his own) Tuscan vernacular as the nation language to replace Latin as the most natural, complete, and accessible means of verbal expression. And the movement was, in fact, successful throughout Europe with the establishment of national languages and literatures. But these very successful national languages then proceeded to ignore local European colonial languages such as Basque and Gaelic, and to suppress overseas colonial languages wherever they were heard. And it was not until the appearance

of Burns in the eighteenth century and Rothenberg, Trask, Vansina, Tedlock, Waley, Walton, Whallon, Jahn, Jones, White-

ly, Beckwith, Herskovitz, and Ruth Finnegan, among many others in this century, that we have returned, at least to the notion of oral literature, although I don’t need to remind you that oral literature is our oldest form of ‘‘auriture” and that it continues richly throughout the world today.° In the Caribbean, our novelists have always been conscious of these native resources, but the critics and academics have, as is often the case, lagged far behind. Indeed, until 1970, there was a positive intellectual, almost social, hostility to the concept of dialect as language. But there were some significant studies in linguistics, such as Beryl Lofton Bailey’s Jamaican Creole Syntax: A Transformational Approach; also: F. G. Cassidy, Jamaica Talk; Cassidy and R. B. LePage, Dictionary of Jamaican English; and, still to come, Richard Allsopp’s mind-blowing Dictionary

of Caribbean English. There are three glossaries from Frank Collymore in Barbados and A. J. Seymour and John R. Rick-

English in the Caribbean 23 ford of Guyana; and studies on the African presence in Caribbean language by Mervyn Alleyne, Beverley Hall, and Maureen Warner Lewis.? In addition, there has been work by Douglas Taylor and Cicely John, among others, on aspects of some of the Amerindian languages; and Dennis Craig, Laurence Carrington, Velma Pollard, and several others at the University of the West Indies’s School of Education have done some work on the structure of nation language and its psychosomosis in and for the classroom.

Few of the writers mentioned, however, have gone into na_ tion language as it affects literature. They have set out its grammar, syntax, transformation, structure, and all of those things. But they haven’t really been able to make any contact between the nation language and its expression in our literature. Recently, a French poet and novelist from Martinque, Edouard Glissant, had a remarkable article in Alcheringa, a nation language journal published at Boston University. The article was called “Free and Forced Poetics,’’ and in it, for the first time, I feel an effort to describe what nation language really means.*® For the author of the article it is the language of enslaved persons. For him, nation language is a strategy: the slave is forced to use a certain kind of language in order to disguise himself, to disguise his personality, and to retain his culture. And he defines that language as “forced poetics” because it is a kind of prison language, if you want to call it that. And then we have another nation language poet, Bruce St. John, from Barbados, who has written some informal introductions to his own work which describe the nature of the experiments that he is conducting and the kind of rules that he begins to perceive in the way that he uses his language.” I myself have an article called “‘Jazz and the West Indian novel,” which appeared in a journal called Bim in the early 1960s,”

and there I attempt to show that the connection between native musical structures and the native language is very necessary to the understanding of nation language. That music is, in fact, the surest threshold to the language that comes out of it.’®

24 Edward Kamau Brathwaite So that is all we have to offer as authority, which isn’t very much, really. But that is how it is. And in fact, one characteristic of nation language is its orality. It is from “the oral tradi-

tion.” And therefore you wouldn’t really expect that large, encyclopedic body of learned comment on it that you would expect for a written language and literature.

Now I'd like to describe for you some of the characteristics of our nation language. First of all it is from, as I’ve said, an

oral tradition. The poetry, the culture itself, exists not in a dictionary but in the tradition of the spoken word. It is based as much on sound as it is on song. That is to say, the noise that it makes is part of the meaning, and if you ignore the noise (or

what you would think of as noise, shall I say), then you lose part of the meaning. When it is written, you lose the sound or the noise, and therefore you lose part of the meaning. Which is, again, why I have to have a tape recorder for this presentation. I want you to get the sound of it, rather than the sight of it.

Now in order to break down the pentameter, we discovered an ancient form which was always there, the calypso.” This is a form that I think everyone knows about. It does not employ the iambic pentameter. It employs dactyls. It therefore mandates the use of the tongue in a certain way, the use of sound in a certain way. It is a model that we are moving naturally toward now. (Ilambic Pentameter) To be or not to be, that is the question

(Kaiso) The stone had skidded arc’d and bloomed into islands

Cuba San Domingo Jamaica Puerto Rico

But not only is there a difference in syllabic or stress pattern, there is an important difference in shape of intonation. In the Shakespeare (above), the voice travels in a single forward plane

English in the Caribbean 25 toward the horizon of its end. In the kaiso, after the skimming movement of the first line, we have a distinct variation. The voice dips and deepens to describe an intervallic pattern. And then there are more ritual forms like kumina, like shango, the religious forms,”® which I won’t have time to go into here, but which begin to disclose the complexity that is possible with nation language. What I am attempting to do this morning is to give you a kind of vocabulary introduction to nation language, rather than an analysis of its more complex forms. But I want to make the point that the forms are capable of remarkable complexity, and if there were time I could take you through some of the more complex musical/literary forms as well. The other thing about nation language is that it is part of what may be called total expression, a notion that is not unfamiliar to you because you are coming back to that kind of thing now. Reading is an isolated, individualistic expression.

The oral tradition, on the other hand, makes demands not only on the poet but also on the audience to complete the community: the noise and sounds that the poet makes are responded to by the audience and are returned to him. Hence we have the creation of a continuum where the meaning truly resides. And this total expression comes about because people live in the open air, because people live in conditions of poverty, because people come from a historical experience where they had to rely on their own breath patterns rather than on paraphernalia like books and museums. They had to depend on immanence, the power within themselves, rather than the technology outside themselves.

Let me begin by playing for you, first of all, some West Indian poets who are writing in standard English, or if you like, in West Indian standard English. The first poet is Claude McKay, who some people think of as American. He appears in American anthologies, especially anthologies of black writing. (Until

recently, American anthologies hardly ever contained black writers, except perhaps Phillis Wheatley.) But McKay (1889-

26 Edward Kamau Brathwaite 1940) was born in Jamaica and was a policeman in the constab-

ulary there for some years before emigrating to the States where he quickly became a leading figure in what has come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance. But although he is very much identified with the black movement, he was, except perhaps during the most productive years of his life, rather ambivalent about his negritude.’© And in this recording made toward

the end of his life in the forties, when he had moved from communism to catholicism, for instance, he is saying, in this lead-in to his most famous and militant poem, “If we must die,”’

a banner poem if ever there was one (it is a counter-lynching poem), that he is a poet, not a black poet, and not, as he said in those days, a ‘‘coloured” poet. And he goes on to recount the story of how a copy of “If we must die’? was found on the body of a dead (white) soldier during the First World War. The newspapers recorded the occasion and everyone started quoting the poem. But no one, McKay says, said—“‘perhaps they did not

even know’’—that he was black. Which was okay by him, he says, because it helped ensure his “universality.” (Winston Churchill also quoted this poem—without attributing it to the author who, when he had gone to Bernard Shaw for encouragement in earlier days, had been advised by the Grand Old Man [after Shaw had taken a shrewd look at him] that he’d better try it as a boxer!) Well, that’s the first stage and story of our literature. We want to be universal, to be universally accepted. But it’s the terrible terms meted out for universality that interest me. In

order to be “universal’? McKay forsook his nation language, forshook his early mode of poetry and went to the sonnet.’ And his sonnet, ‘‘St Isaac’s Church, Petrograd,” is a poem that could have been written by a European, perhaps most intimately by a Russian in Petrograd. It certainly could have been written by any poet of the post-Victorian era. The only thing that

retains its uniqueness here (in terms of my notion of nation language) is the tone of the poet’s voice. But the form and the

English in the Caribbean 27 content are very closely connected to European models. This does not mean that it is a bad poem or that I] am putting it down. I am merely saying that, aesthetically, there are no unique elements in this poem apart from the voice of the poet reciting his own poem. And I will have a musical model that will appear after you have listened to the poem, and you can tell me whether you think I am fair or not. (On tape: McKay reading his sonnet followed by the “Agnus Dei” from Fauré’s Requiem. ) Bow down my soul in worship very low And in the holy silences be lost Bow down before the marble Man of Woe, Bow down before the singing angel host .. 8

The only trouble is that McKay had “trouble” with his syllables, his Clarendon syllables are very “evident,” and he didn’t always say “the,” but sometimes said ‘“‘de,” which is a form in nation language. And these elisions, the sound of them, subtly erode, somewhat, the classical pentametric of the sonnet.... Our second poet is George Campbell, also of Jamaica. In 1945, Jamaica was, after a long history of struggle, granted by Britain the right to move toward self-government and independence with a new political constitution and the formation of the People’s National Party. George Campbell was very moved by, and involved in, these events, and he wrote what I consider his finest poem: On this momentous night O God help us. With faith we now challenge our destiny. Tonight masses of men will shape, will hope, Will dream with us; so many years hang on Acceptance. Why is that knocking against The door?.......is it you Looking for a destiny, or is it Noise of the storm?”

Now you see here a man who is becoming conscious of his

28 Edward Kamau Brathwaite nationality. But when he comes to write his greatest poem, he is still writing a Miltonic ode; or perhaps it is because he’s writing his greatest poem, that it must be given that kind of

nobility.*° And it is read by our Milton of the Caribbean, George Lamming, our great organ voice, a voice that Lamming himself, in his book The Pleasures of Exile (1960) recognizes

as one of the finest in English orature. But the point is that from my perspective, George Campbell’s ode, fittingly read by George Lamming, isn’t giving us any unique element in terms of the Caribbean environment. But it is still a beautiful poem

wonderfully read. (On tape: Lamming reading Campbell’s

poem....) Must the horse rule the rider or the man The horse. Wind where cometh the fine technique Of rule passing through me? My hands wet with The soil and I knowing my world

[The reading was followed by the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony] 7

The models are important here, you see. The McKay can be matched with Fauré, Campbell/Lamming with Beethoven. What follows next on the tape, however, is equally important because our local Beethoven employs a completely different model. I’m

not saying his model is equal to the Fifth Symphony, but it makes a similar statement, and it gets us into what I now consider the nation or native language. Big Yout’s sound poem, “Salaman Agundy,”’ begins with a scream (On tape: Big Yout’s “Screamin’ Target’’/“Salaman Agundy”’ from the LP Screamin’ Target [Kingston, c. 1972]), followed by the bass-based reggae canter of downbeat on the first ‘‘syllable’’ of the first and sec-

ond bars, followed by a syncopation on the third third, followed by full offbeat/downbeats in the fourth:

AS etl eo#Fs cletcslesee (#) # (#) (#4) # #HHEH

English in the Caribbean 29 The other model that we have, and that we have always had in the Caribbean, is the calypso, and we are going to hear now the Mighty Sparrow singing a kaiso which came out in the early sixties. It marked, in fact, the first major change in consciousness that we all shared. And Sparrow made a criticism of all that I and Dennis have been saying about the educational system. In “Dan is the Man in the Van” he says that the education we get from England has really made us idiots because all of those things that we had to read about: Robin Hood, King Alfred and the Cakes, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, all of these things really haven’t given us anything but

empty words. And he did it in the calypso form. And you should hear the rhyme scheme of this poem. He is rhyming on “n’s”? and “‘’s,”? and he is creating a cluster of syllables and a counterpoint between voice and orchestra, between individual

and community, within the formal notion of ‘‘call and response,”’ which becomes typical of our nation in the revolution. (Solo) Acordin to de education you get = when you small You(Il) grow up wi(th) true ambition an respec for one an all But in MY daysin school _ they teach me like a fool THE THINGS THEY TEACH ME A SHOULDA BEEN A BLOCK-HEADED MULE

(Chorus) Pussy has finish his work long ago An now he restin an ting Solomon Agundy was born on a MunDEE DE ASS IN DE LION SKIN... .””

I could bring you a book, The Royal Reader, or the one referred to by Sparrow, Nelson’s West Indian Reader by J. O. Cut-

teridge, that we had to learn at school by heart. It contained phrases like: ‘‘the cow jumped over the moon,” “ding dong bell,

pussy in the well,” and so on. I mean, that was our beginning of an understanding of literature. Literature started (startled, really) literally at that level, with that kind of model. The problem of transcending this is what I am talking about now. A more complex form by Sparrow is this next poem, ‘“‘Ten to

30 Edward Kamau Brathwaite One Is Murder.” Now it’s interesting how this goes, because Sparrow has been accused of shooting someone on the eve of Carnival, just before Lent. (Kaiso and Carnival are two of our great folk expressions.) Now Sparrow apparently shot someone, but because of the popular nature of the calypsonian, he was able to defend himself long before he got into court by creating the scenario for the reason why he shot the man. He shot the man, he says, because for no reason at all, ten irates suddenly appear one night, surround him, and started throwing stones. The one in front was a very good pelter, and Sparrow didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t even find shelter. So he ran and ran and ran until finally he remembered that he had a gun (a wedger) in his pocket. He was forced to take it out and shoot pow pow pow and the crowd start to scatter. As a result he had the community on his side before the trial even started. But even if he hadn’t written the song, he would have had the community on his side because here you have a folk poet; and folk poets are the spokesmen whose whole concern is to express the experiences of the people rather than the experiences of the elite. But here is “Ten to One Is Murder.” Each slash phrase is an impressionistic brush stroke: About ten in de night on de fifth of October Ten to One is Murder! Way down Henry Street, up by H. G. M. Walker Ten to One is Murder! Well, de leader of de gang was a lot like a pepperrr Ten to One is Murder! _ An every man in de gang had a white-handle razorrr Ten to One is Murder! They say ah push a gal from Grenada Ten to One is Murder! .. .*°

Now that is dramatic monologue which, because of its calland-response structure (in addition, of course, to its own intrinsic drama), is capable of extension on stage. There is in fact

a tent form known as calypso drama, which calls upon Trini-

English in the Caribbean 31 dadian nation forms like grand charge, picong, robber talk, and so on, which Sparrow is in fact consciously using in this calypso, and which some of the younger Trinidadian nation poets like Malik, Questel, and Christopher Laird, for example, are bringing into play in their poetry. Man a start to sweat. Man a soakin wet Mama so much threat: that’s a night a can never forget Ten to One is Murder! ...

Next we have the poet who has been writing nation all her life and who, because of that, has been ignored until recently: the poet Louise Bennett (Miss Lou) of Jamaica. Now this is very interesting because she is middle class, and ‘“‘middle class’”’

means brown, urban, respectable, and standard English, and “the snow was falling in the canefields.”** It certainly doesn’t mean an entrenched economic/political position, as in Europe. For instance, Miss Lou’s mother’s and Miss Lou’s own upbringing was “rural St Mary,” hence the honorable Louise’s natural and rightful knowledge of the folk.?* (It was not until the postindependence seventies that she was officially—as distinct from popularly—recognized and given the highest honors, including

the right to the title of Honorable.) But one is supposed, as V. S. Naipaul once said at a memorable Writers Conference in Jamaica, to graduate out of these things;”° therefore there is no

reason why Louise should have persisted with Anancy and Auntie Roachie and boonoonoonoos an parangles an ting, when she could have opted for ‘‘And how are you today,” the teeth and lips tight and closed around the mailed fist of a smile. But her instincts were that she should use the language of her people. The consequence was that for years (since 1936?) she performed her work in crowded village halls across the island, and

until 1945 could get nothing accepted by the Gleaner, the island’s largest, oldest (estab. 1854), and often only newspaper. (Claude McKay had been published in Kingston, including in

the Gleaner, in 1912, but he had had an influential white

32 Edward Kamau Brathwaite sponsor, the Englishman Walter Jeckyll, compiler of Jamaican Song and Story [1907].)?” And although by 1962 she had already published nine books,’* Miss Lou does not appear among the poets in the Independent Anthology of Jamaican Poetry,

but is at the back of the book, like an afterthought if not an embarrassment, under ‘‘Miscellaneous.”? She could not be ac-

cepted, even at the moment of political independence, as a poet. Though all this, as I say, is dramatically altered now with the Revolution of the late sixties, her consciousness of this unfortunate situation remains where it hurts most: “I have been set apart by other creative writers a long time ago because of

the language I speak and work in... From the beginning nobody recognized me as a writer.’’? I couldn’t satisfactorily reproduce in print Miss Lou’s ‘‘Street Cries” played for the lecture from her long-playing album Miss Lou’s Views.°° Here instead

are two examples of her more “formal” verse from the book collection Jamaica Labrish, recordings from which, Miss Lou in-

forms me, should be available alongside the revised edition of Labrish quite soon.*' First, ‘Pedestrian Crosses”’: If a cross yuh dah-cross, Beg yuh cross mek me pass. Dem yah crossin’ is crosses yuh know! Koo de line! Yuh noh se Cyar an truck backa me? Hear dah hoganeer one deh dah-blow! Missis, walk fas’ an cross! Pickney, cross mek me pass!

Lady, galang an mine yuh business! Ole man mek up yuh mine Walk between dem white line! Wat a crosses dem crossin yah is!

De crossin a-stop we from pass mek dem cross, But nutten dah-stop dem from cross mek we pass, Dem yah crossin is crosses fe true!”

English in the Caribbean 33 And “Dutty Tough” begins: Sun a-shine but tings noh bright, Doah pot a-bwile, bickle noh nuff, River flood but water scarce yaw, Rain a-fall but dutty tuff!

And ends on this note of social commentary: De price 0’ bread gan up so high Dat we haffe agree, Fe cut we y’eye pon bread an all Tun dumplin refugee! An all dem mawga smaddy weh Dah-gwan like fat is sin, All dem deh weh dah-fas’ wid me, Ah lef dem to dumplin!

Sun a-shine an pot a-bwile, but Ting noh bright, bickle noh nuff! Rain a-fall, river dah-flood, but Wata scarce an dutty tuff!°°

These are the models that we have, and I could give you more complex examples than the ones you have so far heard. What I am going to do now, however, since there is a constraint on time for this session, is give you an idea of how the “main-

stream” anglophone Caribbean poets reached the stage signalled by Miss Lou.

The mainstream poets who were moving from standard English to nation language were influenced basically, I think (again the models are important), by T. S. Eliot. What T. S. Eliot did for Caribbean poetry and Caribbean literature was to introduce the notion of the speaking voice, the conversational tone.” That is what really attracted us to Eliot. And you can see how the Caribbean poets introduced here have been influenced by him, although they eventually went on to create their own environmental expression.

The first poet (writing in the forties) is a magistrate and his-

3 4 Edward Kamau Brathwaite torian from Barbados, called H. A. Vaughan, and he is reading a sonnet called ‘For Certain Demogogues.” It is a “standard English” poem except for a passage toward the end when the image of blackbirds appears. Here, suddenly for the first time, and rare in Vaughan’s poetry, he imitates the sound and the motion, the movement of the hopping of these peculiar birds and gets this into his poetry, which becomes one of the first and early stages of nation language: mimesis. In fact, had I not heard this poem, I might never have “‘recognized”’ it. ‘We love the people, sir!’ You do? You ought to! nay, indeed, you must Shouting their needs has brought a new Elation to your fickle dust

You prey, but not like beasts of prey; The cobblers fly too far to be Your emblem; in a higgling way You have a place in history; Like blackbirds in their shiny coats Prinking and lifting spry, proud feet, Bickering and picking sodden oats From horses’ offal in the street.”

Now we must also hear from Frank Collymore,*® who is a schoolmaster and editor of the magazine Bim that I mentioned earlier. Here is the conversational tone of the early fifties. He is talking about going back to school and the materialist dangers of scholastic education, continuing the theme, in fact, that is being raised by Dennis Brutus’s lecture, and Sparrow’s calypso, and Big Yout’s ‘“Salaman Agundy,” but getting it all into a wonderfully achieved conversational style and tone. There is, however, no nation language as such here; no unique element similar to Vaughan’s “blackbirds,” for instance. But the conversational mode can have a corrosive effect on the tyranny of the pentameter:

English in the Caribbean 35 In a couple of weeks’ time school will reopen If not with a flourish of trumpets at least with a shout From the several hundred boys gathered together in the building,

And though a few perhaps may wonder what it’s all about... The fuss of education, I mean... their parents and the others Who have to fit the bill of books and shoes Will be prouder than ever that their young are well on the road To knowledge—not that they'll be caring particularly who’s Going to dish out the stuff, or even what it is for that matter, Only the platters have got to be picked clean, And afterwards with the School Certificate nicely framed And the New Order hovering suspiciously near the scene! French irregular verbs, quadratic equations, Maybe a century in the First Division . . . who knows? And for those who can’t take it all in by the prescribed method There’s a road to the brain through the backside by blows. . . .*”

Our third established poet, John Figueroa, writing in the late sixties, now begins to use nation language, and he uses it as a very self-conscious and formal contrast to standard English,

as a reaction, no doubt, to the folk/nation rupture (I won’t say irruption, though some hoped that it was merely an interruption) that had taken place in our poetry with the publication of my Rights of Passage (London, 1967), and the effects of the great literary debate that had taken place a few years before that on the issue of literature and dialect (1965) when it was demonstrated, for perhaps the first time (at last), that a nation language poem could be serious and employ not only semantic but sound elements: in this case, the sound-structure of Rastafarian drums and the “‘Dry Bones” spiritual: Watch dem ship dem come to town dem full o’ silk dem full 0’ food dem an’ dem plane dem come to groun’ dem

36 Edward Kamau Brathwaite full 0’ flash dem full 0’ cash dem silk dem food dem shoe dem wine dem

dat dem drink dem an consume dem praisin’ de glory of the Lord... .*®

This ‘“‘riddmic” aspect of Caribbean nation language was to

be further extended in the late seventies by the Jamaican reggae/dub poets Oku Onoura (Orlando Wong), Michael Smith (whom we shall hear from later), and Linton Kwesi Johnson of

Black London. This is from ‘‘Five Nights of Bleedin” from Johnson’s LP Dread Beat an Blood: night number one was in BRIX/TON: SOFRANO B sounn sys/tem was a-beatin out a riddim/ wid a fyah, commin doun his reggae-reggae wyah;

it was a sounn shakin doun you spinal col/umn, a bad music tearin up you flesh; an th’rebels-dem start a-fightin, th’yout dem jus tunn wild. it’s war amongst th’rebels:

mad/ness...mad/ness... war.... and so wid a flick a de wrist a jab an a stab th’song of blades was soun/ded th’bile of oppression was vom/ited an two policemen woun/ded

righteous righteous war.”

But nation language isn’t confined, as you must have recognized by now, to rhythmic variations. Miss Lou follows the tra-

English in the Caribbean 37 ditional Scots tune very nicely, thank you, with her ‘Every secky got him jeggeh/Every puppy got him flea”; while I got pretty close to Bajan country speech (free cadence and vocabulary) in “The Dust,” also from Rights of Passage, where some women are recalling a volcanic irruption in another island: Some say is in one o’ dem islands away

where they language tie-tongue an’ to hear them speak so in they St Lucia patois is as if they cahn unnerstan’ a single word o’ English. But uh doan really know. All uh know is that one day suddenly so this mountain leggo one brugg-a-lung-go

whole bloody back side o’ this hill like it blow off like they blastin’ stones in de quarry. Rocks big as you cow pen hois’ in de air as if they was one set o’ shingles. That noise, Jesus Chrise, mussa rain down splinter an’ spark as if it was Con-

federation.”

The roots and underground link to all these emerging forces was the now almost legendary Rastafarian poet, Bongo Jerry, whose revolutionary mis/use of Babylonian English was practically apocalyptic: MABRAK

Lightning is the future brightening, for last year man learn

38 Edward Kamau Brathwaite how to use black eyes. (wise! )

MABRAK: NEWSFLASH! “Babylon plans crash”’

Thunder interrupt their programme to announce: BLACK ELECTRIC STORM

IS HERE How long you feel ‘‘fair to fine”’ (WHITE) would last?

How long in darkness when out of BLACK come forth LIGHT? MABRAK is righting the wrongs and brain-whitening .. . Not just by washing out the straightening and wearing dashiki t’ing: MOSTOFTHESTRAIGHTENINGISINTHETONGUE-~—